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India moots ‘unbiased’ assessment of trade policies at WTO
Why is it in the news?
- As per the official information, India is trying to rally the support of other developing countries in the WTO to reform the “biased” system of assessing a country’s services trade policies.
More in the news
Official narration:
- The system, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), has significant flaws.
- OECD ranks countries based on their services trade policies, indicating the outcomes are biased and counter-intuitive.
- Launched in 2014, the Services Trade Restrictiveness Index (STRI), computed by the OECD, is now available for 2018 for a total of 45 economies (36 OECD and the rest non-OECD) and 22 sectors.
- The OECD index has some significant design issues that render it impractical for use, a study commissioned by the Commerce Ministry found.
- The study also found that the OECD method resulted in several counter-intuitive results as compared with the real policies implemented by the countries in question, such as ranking India very high in terms of restrictiveness.
- In addition, the data seems to have been generated by rather arbitrary procedures and reflects a developed country bias.
- India has come up with a “better and more reliable” mechanism to measure restrictiveness in the services trade, and has approached China, Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and South Africa to highlight the importance of the new system.
Source
The Hindu.